Director of Software Engineering
San Francisco, CA

Job Description

Overview

Appen is the world's leading innovative technology company, providing high-quality language and data services for machine learning and artificial intelligence. Appen is headquartered in Sydney, Australia and has subsidiaries in United States, United Kingdom, Philippines, and China. Appen has more than 20 years of experience in collecting and processing a variety of data, including data types such as speech, text, and images, etc. Appen has a pool of more than 1 million prequalified crowd resources around the world able to provide data collection and processing services in more than 180 languages. Appen's client include global leaders in high-tech, automotive, e-commerce, etc. and governments to help them develop and improve products and technologies based on natural language understanding and machine learning. Appen is listed on the Australian Stock Exchange with stock code: APX

Key Responsibilities

* Build the Appen workforce management platform which manages workers across the world, and support internal recruiting, client service and domain experts and specialist teams to manage their projects efficiently.
* Build Appen's data lake, which models and stores all Appen's data. Voice data, Video data, transcription data, translation data, relevance data, workers data, internal data, etc. This is the data foundation serves Appen's various applications, internal insights as well as machine learning services;
* Build data insight products. Those products can be reports of project insights and worker insights, or training data insights like visualization, distribution analysis, quality analysis, etc, or internal products to understand better millions of crowd workers.
* Learn and understand AI data need and build all the training data related knowledge into our platform;
* Work with engineers, managers, Product Managers, QE, and Operations teams to develop innovative solutions that meet market needs with respect to functionality, performance, scalability, reliability, realistic schedules, and adhere to development goals and principles.
* Estimate engineering effort, prioritize projects, plan implementations, and help rollout system changes. Help define, and supervise the design and implementation of complex, multi-tier distributed software applications.
* Identify process, technology challenges and deficiencies that need to be addressed and drive those changes to successful adoption.
* Mentor, grow and empower team members in design, coding techniques and time management
* Proactively identify and resolve resource conflicts and set priorities for parallel projects. Work closely with Product Manager on resource and project reprioritization and subsequent impacts. Communicate these impacts effectively.
* Identify project risks and be able to provide alternatives yielding reduced risk.

Requirements

* BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science or related technical discipline (or equivalent).
* 12+ years' work experience in software development area with at least 5+ years' experience in big data development.
* Strong technical acumen with big data platform (relational, non-relational, batch, real time);
* Experience of Hadoop, Map/Reduce, SQL, Kafka/Storm, Elastic Search;
* Excellent understanding of computer science fundamentals, data structures, and algorithms.
* Excellent problem-solving skills.
* Proven results-oriented person with a delivery focus in a high velocity, high quality environment.
* Strong communication skills in Oral and Written English.

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate based on race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.